How large is a fleet and who gets to be in it?

[Lancer]

First of all "Hi" to all from a new guy on this forum.

For the long-term exploration group I would go with a Nebula as the core ship. It's a solid explorer in it's own right and you could use the equipment module to hold some runabouts or additional supplies. Even with replicators you would need supplies and spare parts to keep 3 or 4 ships running on a prolonged mission. If you don't want to use a dedicated supply ship those would have to go somewhere.

A Nova class sounds like a good idea at first, but you have to consider that these are not very fast and certainly not build for missions lasting longer than a few months. If you absolutly want to include a Nova pair it with an escort. That way you could "park" the science ship somewhere (long term planetary survey, etc.) an still give it some protection.
Personaly I'd use a light cruiser instead with some extra scientific equipment and laboratories added.

A Norway class ship would be on my list as well. It's fast enough and could hold it's own in a fight, should the need arise.

Add a second Nebula or maybe an Excelsior and you should do fine.

Whatever combination you prefer IMHO you should go with ships that could work and survive independently from each other, should the group be seperated for any reasons.

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"To seek, to strive, to find and not to yield" - Alfred Tennyson

[This message has been edited by Lancer (edited 04-01-2001).]

[qerlin]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by SIR SIG:
Well thats if you subsribe fully to the 20 odd fleets idea from PoF.

That simply isn't enough ships, only about 600 odd in peace time.

But they may have pumped them out for the War and recomissioned old ships


</font>

That's what I figured, SIG. That's why the Wolf 359 thing (where I think there were only 40 or so ships; could be wrong so don't flame me...) was a huge disaster. Then DS9 has buttloads rolling through the Dominion War; a lot of them older ships like the Excelsior. I figure they keep a lot of stuff sitting pre-positioned in mothballs 'til they need 'em, as well as turning out tons of new stuff.

[Lancer]

Concerning fleet sizes and the Dominion war there is one DS9 episode that could provide usefull information. I'm thinking about the one where Sisko and some admirals are planning the liberation of DS9 from the Dominion (don't now the title - sorry).
In that episode they make a clear statement how many fleets will be involved and counting the ships that we actually see participating in the attack should give us a good idea how many ships are in those fleets.
Maybe somebody has this on video and could check it out?

If I remember it correctly in the same scene one of the admirals objects that using all those ships would leave the defenses of earth dangerously thin. Maybe that's the reason we see very large fleets on DS9 - Starfleet send many of it's "home defense" fleets to the front lines, thinking that they'd rather stop the war at the Cardassian border, even if it left some core worlds only sparsely defended.

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"To seek, to strive, to find and not to yield" - Alfred Tennyson

[Calcoran]

Yup, actually it aired just last sunday in France (that's how you can tell how backward we are concerning Trek in France, even Germany got their final DS9 season one and a half year ago or so) ... second part in 4 days now.

And you're right, it gives a lot of info about fleets, ships and so on ... from the top of my head, they indeed say that leaving only one fleet to defend Earth would dangerously weaken it, and at one point Garak complains because 10 or 12 ships could not keep on with the main force because of damages already received to propulsion (or so we can guess). Haven't taken time to count the number of ships though, even if the thought crossed my mind. I'll have a go this evening.

[SIR SIG]

'Favor the Bold' & 'Sacrifice of Angels'

That is of course where I'm getting my figures from mostly.

* Dominion Fleet = 1254 ships

* Bashir says outnumbered 2 to 1

* Thus Federation task force is roughly 627 ships

* This we know to be 2 fleets (5th & 2nd, 9th was still another day away)

* Thus a rough fleet number of 313 ships

* From 'A Time To Stand' the 7th fleet is 112 ships; after a ambush only 14 survived.

*Thus taking 313 and 112, a average fleet value becomes 212 ships

* Now since there is atleast 10 fleets active in the DW, a rough amount of active/frontline federation ships is 2120

YMMV

PS. The 7th fleet may have been at low strength. The 7th and 10th took quite some beatings during the war.

Aswell the 5th and 2nd may have been bolstered with every ship in the area to combat the large Dominion fleet.

But considering that with the 9th fleet, they would have had close to 1000 ships vs 1254 (which they may have not known to be that large) and SF wouldn't send in a underpowered fleet barring emergency.

Then I theorize that a Dominon War era SF Fleet does indeed average around 300 ships and the few extras were whatever ships left in the area that were commandeered!

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'...The Borg have stopped at deck 10...'
'...Deflector Control, no vital systems...'

Not a vital system! What the heck do you think stops the ship going 'poof' every time it goes to warp?

- ST:First Contact; Lt Hawk

[This message has been edited by SIR SIG (edited 04-04-2001).]

[SIR SIG]

Oh and using my revised figure of 300 ships per fleet then there could have been 3000+ federation ships in the war!

300 ships * 10+ fleets = 3000

The fleet info is taken from the encyclopedia. Interesting enough that in the 10th fleet write up they say; '...Tactical group of Federation starships formed during the war with the Dominion...'

This kinda indicates small 'peace' fleets and they group everything together into task forces during war.

1st: Not mentioned

2nd: Part of the Task Force to retake DS9

3rd: Defends Earth.

4th: Not mentioned

5th: Combat duty along the Vulcan Border. Later part of the Task Force to retake DS9

6th: Not mentioned

7th: 98 of 112 ships destroyed in the Tyra system. Suffered further losses while intercepting a Dominion fleet headed for Vulcan at the Tibor Nebula. Almost half of the ships that were left, were lost en route to Sybaron. Grouped to launch an offensive into the Kalendra Sector.

8th: Not mentioned

9th: Task Force of Federation and Klingon ships assigned to defend Bajor sector. Late participant of the battle to retake DS9.

10th: Defends Betazed, caught out of position on a training exercise.

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'...The Borg have stopped at deck 10...'
'...Deflector Control, no vital systems...'

Not a vital system! What the heck do you think stops the ship going 'poof' every time it goes to warp?

- ST:First Contact; Lt Hawk

[Calcoran]

Well, that's if you assume that all fleet numbers are "filled" ... there could very well be no 8th fleet for finstance, for some obscure historical reason (like reading Terry Pratchett too much or something).
Actually, I just watched the episode again, and it seems to me that when they say "ships", they also count the smaller craft (size 2 or 3). The dominion fleet seems to have plenty of hidekis and dominion attack fighters (beetle class?), and about one third of the federation fleet seems to be talons (on screen we see 4 galaxies, 5 or 6 ambassadors, 7 excelsiors, 8 mirandas, 2 akiras, and a lot of talons, maybe 15 or 20). If you consider that a big part of it is only talons or maybe even runabouts, it makes 200 or 300 ships fleet seem much more believable (the 40 ships who fought the borgs were mostly if not all size 4 or higher).

[Lancer]

Found out I had that episode on tape after all and I agree that a lot (maybe about half of them) of the Fed ships we see are small craft. If that's the norm and not the exception it could explain the low number of ships in the 7th fleet (112) - Bashir only talked about the biger ones and the difference to the large fleets (200+) would be the attack fighters and such. Or maybe this operation took the fleet too far from it's usual theater of operations for the smaler ships to participate.

By the way: All those Size 2 and 3 ships seemd capable of keeping up with the fleet themselves without any carrier

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"To seek, to strive, to find and not to yield" - Alfred Tennyson

[SIR SIG]

Unfortunely Talon's aren't in mass production at that time.

The small ships are Star Fleet Attack Fighters in wings of 4-5.

True I didn't consider the fighters, maybe not half the fleet but a third anyway!

Calcoran: IF going by the encyclopedia that they formed the fleets for the war, then they would be filled, perhaps not at full strength this far into the war but...

Dominion fleets for sure are over half fighters. THe ep were only the klingons are defending with 1500 ships are oputnumbered 20:1. Thus 30000 Dominion, Cardassion, Breen ships.

So okay say 200 capital ships and 100 fighters/support as a full strength taskforce fleet!

Oh and the battle for DS9 was short range, they'd only just left SB375.


------------------
'...The Borg have stopped at deck 10...'
'...Deflector Control, no vital systems...'

Not a vital system! What the heck do you think stops the ship going 'poof' every time it goes to warp?

- ST:First Contact; Lt Hawk

[Lancer]

SIR SIG:

All I'm saying about carriers and fighters is, that those fighters were capable to keep up with the capital ships, meaning the should have decent warp drives themselves. Now if they do I can't imagine Starfleet building ships that can fly at say Warp 7 but only for a few lightyears. (Personaly I never really liked the carrier idea - be it akira class or whatever)

Concerning the Dominion fleet of 30000 ships - do we really believe that? I mean why didn't they just waltz over the whole alpha quadrant and conquer the Federation if they had that many ships? I have a lot of difficulties buying this number.

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"To seek, to strive, to find and not to yield" - Alfred Tennyson

[Calcoran]

About fighters ... first of all, Spacedock makes it rather easy to create ships capable of high warp, but only for a short period of time, and I expect that if it had been uncommon (canonwise I mean) Steve would have made it more difficult. Besides, it makes sense for a fighter to be capable of rather high warp, because they would be pretty useless if not ("Fighters? Right, let's warp outta here!"). However, fighters might be able to reach warp_whatever, considering the cramped conditions onboard a fighter, you wouldn't want to spend more than a few hours in it anyway , so no use for it being able to sustain it's highest warp for weeks, right?
(this has nothing to do with the topic, but since I pretty much agree with what's been stated above (200 to 300 vessels fleet (in times of war) with about one third talons/fighters/runabouts/youcallthem), I wouldn't have anything to say)

[SIR SIG]

Lancer: True but we have no onscreen evidence to support this; we only saw them at high impusle. What the Maquis used were Peregrine modified couriers which do have warp (in case you use that as proof).

Also there is the Shelly class (frankenstein built) that in most areas is accepted as a small carrier; maybe a suadron of 15-20 fighters?

The 30000 ships is canon by the numbers/math. But easily half are Jem'Hadar fighters or they would have ridden over everyone. As well they were across 2 fronts (fed & romulan) and Dominion/Cardassion/Breen components. ie spread out!

Calcoran: Too true, warp probably is a required component. I just don't like the feel of it. Maybe warp 9 for 2 hours? They don't have obvious nacelles though!

------------------
'...The Borg have stopped at deck 10...'
'...Deflector Control, no vital systems...'

Not a vital system! What the heck do you think stops the ship going 'poof' every time it goes to warp?

- ST:First Contact; Lt Hawk

[qerlin]

I tend to aggree with Sig on the size of fleets. I also think that the numbering of the flets would most likely not be a cut and dried 1-9 type thing. The POF mentions the 16th and 22nd Fleets (Mobile). In the US and other navies, the fleets don't have consistently conseq numbering.

Reasons? Say you start off with 6 fleets and during a comflict beef up to 8. You lose a couple of fleets. Those numbers are usually not used again for some time; replacement fleets come under different numbers. Or you roll up a fleet after a conflict into another (9th and 5th fleets, due to their location, are now under centralized command as 9th, or some such...)

Don't ask me why, but it seems to be a tradition thing.

[SIR SIG]

Why Qerlin, Why?

Seriously though, by tradition if SF follows most of the Earth wet navies stuff I'd agree.

But going off the encyclopedia, the 10 fleets were formed specifically for the war. So at the time of forming I'd say they were full up 10*300 fleets.

Now sure they losted alot of ships, but a big decimation like that you would've heard about it. The closer fleet to come to that was the 7th. And she was later seen in action with replenished numbers.

Now I agree some fleets just weren't mentioned but I consider the 7th the worst hit and it recovered. Personally I'd stick to 10 Task Force Fleets of 200 capital vessels and 100 smaller craft. Thus a starting cvalue of 3000 ships for the war.

Even if we take PoF as a peace time small fleet system, they still have to find some 2000+ ships to make the pre war starting numbers app. 4 years later.

Evidently some ships are indeed recommissioned older vessels and maybe some commercial craft appropriated by SF like many governments in WWI and II!

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'...The Borg have stopped at deck 10...'
'...Deflector Control, no vital systems...'

Not a vital system! What the heck do you think stops the ship going 'poof' every time it goes to warp?

- ST:First Contact; Lt Hawk

[Phantom]

I have noticed that you have to take standing fleet numbers in ST, particularly during the war, with a asteroid of salt. I have always taken that Starfleet is a small, relatively speaking, organization. Why else would Wolf 359 have been such a big hit to the fleet, they lost 39 vessels and that was considered major. Now, this is where you begin to tell that the writers have no concept of logistics...It was stated they would be able to get the fleet back on its feet in a year after 359, I buy that.

What I find a little hard to believe is the seeming hugh numbers that Star Fleet fielded during the war. Given that 39 vessels destroyed at Wolf was such a large loss, I estimate that the fleet consisted of a couple of hundred "ships of the line" and probably times two smaller craft. Which totals about 600-800 vessels in the fleet. Now, taking into consideration mothballed and ships relagated to training command that could be brought up to combat levels probably adds maybe another 200 that weren't scrapped altogether, it is expensive to keep a ship in mothballs after all. So that brings the total to about 1000-1200 vessels for the war.

Considering that they had built about 5 Galaxy class ships in about 10 years and only 2 Sovereign class in about 3 years...there really should not be that many of the BB class ships in the fleet. The smaller ones Excelsior, New Orleans, Niagara, etc could probably be rolled off the assembly lines pretty quickly, but not so quickly to reflect the numbers seen in battles like Chin'toka. My personal feelings on the matter is the CGI guys should not have gone with what looked "cool" (I have to abmit it did) but what would have looked a little more realistic. As one of my gaming group pointed out..."Starship combat in Star Trek looks more like fighter combat", ie. far too many ships moving far to "freely". Look at Empire Strikes Back, the scene where the 2 Star Destroyers are heading toward each other one of the captains yells "Evasive action" and the ship didn't start to change course before half of the other ship went by. But I digress on this last point.

Anyway just my 2 cents worth.